Night Lost

by Lynn Viehl

Page 7

 

  Will I ever see it again?

  Gabriel remembered how in the dreams she had often turned her face up, as if to bathe it in sunlight. Unlike him, she was human, a creature of the day. Were she real, she would be awake now, working and thinking and being with those for whom she cared. Doubtless she took delight in such things.

  He envied her that, the ability to thrive in the true light of the world. Of all the simple pleasures of mortal life, he missed those waking hours, riding across the fields, walking through his mother's gardens, following the track of deer through the dappled green mansion of the forest.

  The night played thief, stealing all the color from the world, until it became a haunted house of strange shapes and frightening shadows.

  Think of her, in the sunlight. Where she walks in splendor.

  Gabriel might have blamed his wistful regrets for her recurring presence in his dreams, but his pale maiden seemed too real to be an invention of his guilt and sadness. Nor could he recall a time when he had met a female like her. Her appearance sometimes changed—the curls of her hair, like wisps of moonlight, would stream down past her shoulders one night, then cluster around her ears the next—but the contours of her face and eyes remained constant.

  She felt more real than he did.

  Other things tugged at his reason. At times she seemed very young, with the wayward curiosity of a child, but she held herself with an alertness that belied her surface appearance and actions. Gabriel sensed that if she were real, she had not strayed innocently into the nightlands. Some purpose had caused their paths to cross, one that had nothing to do with him or finding him. She never came into the dreams seeking him; that much he had sensed from the beginning. Yet after the first encounters she had begun greeting him with obvious pleasure and affection. She might be the only comfort left in his dark world, but he might be nothing more to her than a pleasant fantasy.

  He had tried to speak of it to her. Have you lost your way again?

  Just dreaming.

  A strange sound roused Gabriel from thoughts of her. He lifted his head and listened. He knew it was likely to be only Claudio, the elderly human male whom he had occasionally smelled. Gabriel knew his name only because Benait had spoken it before he had departed. Claudio had been left behind to serve as a sentry, perhaps, to keep other humans away and assure that Gabriel would not escape this, the last of their prisons. The old man never came into the basement level or near the narrow stairwell leading to it.

  He never will.

  Gabriel's open wounds had ceased bleeding, but blood starvation now sapped his strength. What little he could do about it dwindled by the hour. Soon his talent would fail him, and then his body would begin to feed upon itself.

  There were stories among his kind of Kyn trapped in prisons or other places from which they could not escape. They were much stronger than humans, so it often took a year or more for them to die. When the end finally came, they left behind skeletons so desiccated that a touch caused them to disintegrate.

  No one spoke of the agony of withering away to dust, but some part of Gabriel knew it would surpass everything the Brethren had inflicted upon him.

  I am not dust yet.

  The sound came again, distant and muffled—a high-pitched, mechanical sound—and then it slowed and stopped.

  A small vehicle, Gabriel guessed. Not a car; the engine was too small. He looped the memory of the sound in his mind until he identified it: that of a motorcycle. No vehicle had driven near the property since Benait had left, and Claudio traveled about on foot, so Gabriel had guessed that the roads around the chateau were seldom used.

  A tourist, stopping by the road to picnic? Or to explore?

  Minutes ticked away in silence. The engine did not start again. When Gabriel heard the soft weight of footsteps crossing the ground, he almost did not believe his ears. But no, the newcomer walked with purpose, almost hurrying toward him.

  Gabriel wondered if his mind was inventing the footsteps as some new form of self-torture, until ancient wood creaked, and the temperature of the air seeping into his chamber changed minutely. The sound of hard-soled shoes on the stone above his head confirmed the reality of the visitor.

  Someone had entered the chapel. Not the old man; the steps sounded too quick, too light. Someone else.

  Benait had intended the chamber to be airtight, but long months and other things had eaten away at the mortar between the bricks. Gabriel breathed in, filling his lungs with as much air as possible, identifying every change in it until he tasted…

  Woman.

  Gabriel had once been the best hunter and tracker among the Kyn, and nothing the Brethren had done had damaged his senses. The scent of the human, like that of any animal's, told him many things. She was young, healthy, and clean. She wore leather and cotton, and had recently walked through damp moss and rich soil. Perfume did not mask the natural fragrance of her body, which came into his head like cool, pure water from a stream. Her body was not cold, however. Her passage colored the air with radiant human warmth.

  Gabriel's dents acérées, which had not extruded into his mouth since his capture, slowly emerged from the shriveled spaces in his palate, tearing through the thin layer of flesh that had grown over them. As they extended, his hands curled against the need that came with them, the need to take her, his teeth in her flesh, her veins pulsing, her heart beating steadily as she gave him life.

  I will have her.

  He ignored the slavering hunger surging inside him and turned his focus within. He could not use his talent to bring her to him; unless she were bespelled his appearance would terrify her. He could not control her mind at all unless she came close enough to smell him.

  When she did, she would do whatever he wished—or so he hoped.

  Before Gabriel had been imprisoned, using l'attrait to attract humans to him had been effortless and usually involuntary. Starvation had at first made his scent stronger, but years of deprivation had made it as weak as his limbs. In his condition, he would have to draw on his last reserve of strength and force his body to produce enough scent to permeate the closed chamber and perhaps lure her to him. Before he did, he had to wait to see if she would venture down the stairs.

  He would not waste this, perhaps his only chance to escape.

  She did not move down the center of the chapel, as Benait and Claudio had. She skirted the edges of it, as if keeping close to the walls. His sensitive ears heard her touching things here and there, the brush of her palms light but lingering. He could taste the heat of sunlight; she was not feeling her way through darkness. No, the woman sought something—something in the very walls themselves—with slow, careful fingers.

  If only her quest would lead her to him.

  Gabriel tracked the sounds of her movements as she made a complete circuit of the chapel. The sounds not only told him of her location but gave him the first approximation of the area of the chapel itself. Small and narrow, it must have been built to serve a noble family of modest means.

  Throughout the ages, great families had made a show of their devotion to God by build enormous chapels and churches on their property. The government of modern France had spent billions buying, restoring, and turning such places into visitor attractions. Wherever they had brought him, it would not be a site that commanded historic restoration. That, combined with the direction and distance the truck had traveled from Paris, meant that the Brethren had brought him south, perhaps only a short distance east of his estate in Toulouse.

  Temerleone, Gabriel thought, recalling remote properties that had been left to rot in the Bordelais region. Or St. Valereye. Given the respective populations around both of the chateaux, it was more likely that the latter served as his prison. She will tell me. She will tell me everything I must know, and then her flesh will yield to mine, and I will know all of her tastes.

  Denial made his perpetual hunger swell
, causing his dents acérées to throb and his exhausted limbs to tighten. At the same time his heart shriveled. Since learning to control his appetite for human blood, Gabriel had never fallen into thrall, or caused a human to die by draining her body of blood while within the corresponding state of rapture.

  That did not mean he had forgotten what it felt like, and it felt like this. The woman searching the chapel now might be his savior, but the moment she released him, he would be her killer.

  The beast inside him that demanded feeding did not care. It is her life, or mine. So did that part of his soul, rendered unfeeling by his talent. She will not be made to suffer, as I have been—

  No.

  Gabriel had once been human, like the woman. He remembered the vows he had taken during that life, and the God he had worshiped. He had been a warrior, and had fought for the Holy Land, but he had never thirsted for blood. He had obeyed his Templar master, and guarded well the secrets of their order, but he had never put his own needs before those of others.

  He no longer walked the earth as a human, but he had not forgotten how it felt to brave the world in a fragile form, undaunted, unafraid.

  I cannot take her life to save my own.

  Even as that knowledge scalded him, the old man's voice wrenched him out of his snarled thoughts. "What are you doing here, boy?"

  Boy? Gabriel inhaled again. The old man's sweat, acrid with his fear, added a sour top note to the air, but it did not disguise or alter the taste of the female.

  "I wanted to take photos. " She spoke in low, somewhat stilted French, but it was the timbre of her voice that shocked Gabriel. "This place is very old. Are you fixing it up for someone?"

  It cannot be her.

  "It is too old to be fixed, boy. No one is allowed here. " Claudio's voice moved to the center of the chapel. "You see that beam? It came down only yesterday. The rest of the roof could fall in at any moment. Go back to the village. Take your pictures of the church there. "

  "I'll only be a minute—"

  "Get out, idiot, or I call the police. "

  No sound came except the rasp of the old man's breath, and then the light, soft footsteps that crossed the chapel floor and outside onto the grounds.

  She was leaving.

  The chains binding Gabriel rattled as his muscles went lax. The sound of the motorcycle engine barely registered. That he had come so close to escape did not dismay him as much as the woman's voice did.